May 21, 2020 (MedicalXpress) -- The hearts of group drummers synchronize.

In an interdisciplinary study published today in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers have reported their discovery that while drumming together, aspects of group members' heart function -- specifically the time interval between individual beats (IBI) -- synchronized.

This physiological synchronization was recorded during a novel musical drumming task that was specially developed for the study in a collaboration between social-neuroscientists and scholars from the Music Department at Israel's Bar-Ilan University.

Group work and cooperation are crucial in everyday life. As such, it is important to explore the avenues by which synchrony within a group may enhance cohesion and influence performance.

"We believe that joint music-making constitutes a promising experimental platform for implementing ecological and fully interactive scenarios that capture the richness and complexity of human social interaction," says Prof. Gilboa of the Department of Music, who co-authored the study.